It is known to provide an Operational Support System (OSS) for managing a telecommunications network made up of network elements such as routers, gateways, optical terminals, nodes or components of nodes and so on. The OSS is sometimes called, or has a component called a network management system (NMS) and typically undertakes any or all of the management functions known as FCAPS, that is, fault management, configuration management, accounting management, performance management, and security management. These management functions can each encompass a variety of operations. The operations (sometimes called OSS applications) may be carried out with respect to an individual network element, or involve a group of network elements, or involve a service making use of many network elements level as appropriate. The OSS typically has a remote part hosted on one or more servers at some central location, and can have local or distributed parts such as agent software hosted at network elements. The centralized part of the OSS typically needs to communicate with the network elements to carry out its operations. A Data Communications Network (DCN) is provided for this, logically distinct from the telecommunications network being managed by the OSS, but in physical terms the DCN may be partly separate (also called an “access” part of the DCN, or out-of-band) and partly using resources of the telecommunications network (in band).
The DCN typically consists of computers, routers/switches and managed equipments, all of these in a typical example may be compliant with ITU-T Q.811. The DCN enables network element management from OSS applications, and a healthy DCN allows the applications to run at the best performance and to respond nearly real time to the given task. The NEs can be interconnected to the DCN via an Ethernet Interface (Gateway NE) in one example, or between them via embedded channels inside the traffic lines (STM-n for SDH or optical channels for DWDM for example). These embedded channels are called, depending from the kind of frame overhead they use, DCCs, OSCs, GCCs, and others.
For protection purpose, several DCC/OSCs/GCCs channels can be activated between nodes flowing same or separated optical links, and the routing algorithm metrics will allow the proper routing path selection. The same considerations may apply when the data plane is based on Ethernet links, where specific VLAN tags are used to carry management data and logically protected DCN topologies are in place.
It is useful to be able to manage the DCN, especially as it becomes more complex. Specific applications are known to auto-discover and monitor the deployed DCN to manage equipments, including out-of-band and in-band communication channels, able to automatically understand, for each discovered node, the type and a set of relevant attributes (such as the nodes having a DCN GNE function and the set of nodes managed through them).
It is also known to monitor the OSS applications by providing health check mechanisms on the hosting platform (e.g. memory/disk usage, SW processes CPU consumption, etc.), to be able to anticipate possible platform related problems before these will impact the OSS applications running on it. Otherwise it is left to the design and configuration of the OSS applications and the DCN to ensure there is enough margin of capability in the DCN so that the OSS applications run sufficiently quickly and reliably.